Fable

We never spoke, not even once, but we had the best communication I’ve ever had with a woman. She could talk, I’ve seen her do it with other people, but she and I only conversed with touch. Her touch spoke volumes. That first year together we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

Then we stopped all physical contact, and merely communicated with our eyes. We gazed and understood what the other was thinking. Sight told us everything we needed to know, and with absolute certainty.

When she became blind, I still had my vision, although with her out of the picture it didn’t take long for me to join her in perpetual darkness. We were both surprised to find that we knew the other’s whereabouts, and what the other was thinking. By now, we seldom ventured from the house, so it was only a matter of keeping track of which room we were in.

When she died, I knew it within a few minutes. The air grew cold, there was a strange mechanical sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. I stumbled across her body at the bottom of the stairs. It was then that I began to tell her everything I hadn’t told her, and it took me days until I felt I could stop talking. Then my sight returned.

She appeared younger than I remembered her. Rigor mortis had come and gone, but her complexion had always been pale, so that wasn’t what I found shocking. It was her expression. Her face was frozen into a horrible scowl. The lips were drawn back, exposing her sharp incisors, which made her seem more like a vampire or a predatory cat than the sweet person I once knew so well.